The question of sexuality is wild, isn’t it? Is homosexual ‘practice’ somehow wrong? Just the question phrased this way contains at least three presuppositions, all of which hold biases that must be addressed in any thorough-going answer. First the word homosexual is a construct. Certainly, there are as many ways of being gay as there are people who so identify. A trip to any Pride parade or Gayborhood will attest to this observation. ‘Homosexual practice’ as opposed to homosexuality or the real lived experience of being attracted to one’s own ‘sex’ or ‘gender’ is fraught with questions. Is it ‘homosexual practice’ for a male-presenting person to hold hands with another masc-presenting person? In certain cultures, such a ‘practice’ would be culturally-speaking no more shocking than lovers holding hands is here in the United States. Yet it would contain no romantic or sexual connotation whatsoever. I can attest, however, to the thrill and connection felt from such a simple act. As for how ‘wrong’ or not it may be, at least let’s grant that not everyone considers the Bible to be the inerrant Word of God, infallible and authoritative for life and practice in all things, as interpreted by the Church. So how do we measure what is right and wrong? Whose authority allows such judgments to be made? Like I said, there are many questions.
From certain perspectives, I am and have been in a mixed orientation marriage. Am I to understand that acting out my romantic and sexual desires with men would be somehow wrong? For some people, the answer is an immediate and most assured “yes”. Some other people believe the Bible allows for one to embrace same-sex attraction and/or a gay identity but do not believe that same-sex sexual relationships (including sex) honor God as revealed by the Bible. However, there’s not even consensus around that. From that point of view, an LGBT+ person has the choice of either a celibate life or a cis-heteronormative marriage, like I have had.
Nevertheless, I have real questions, which I have always had but never been able to ask. What’s more, I can finally think from a point of view that isn’t the cult-like Evangelical fundamentalist theology I have known most of my life. Suddenly there seemed to be room in the Christian faith, that is, other ways of being a Christian, or perhaps not being a ‘Christian’ at all depending on how that term is defined.
The first change I had was realizing that my sexual orientation is not broken and in need of Jesus’ ‘healing’. Attending churches where this is still the dominant presupposition about LGBT+ identities is unbearable for me. It makes me irate. Full disclosure: I have not been attending church since shortly after we left the ‘Christian’ cult in Paris in May 2017. There are too many triggers to navigate from 39 years of spiritual abuse and the religious trauma it dealt me to want to go back. I have most recently met with a couple of pastors, honestly with uncertain intentions. Perhaps one of them was to determine exactly what “open and affirming” for a church really means.
There are differing degrees or a spectrum of what it means to be open and affirming in the life of a church. Are the leadership and congregation happy for me that I’m queer? Is it an enthusiastic YES! Do they want me to have romantic and sexual relationships with guys I’m attracted to? Or is it just not a secret and taboo anymore? There’s a long distance between thinking there is nothing wrong with it anymore and celebrating it as part of God’s own creation. Do LGBT+ people feel “affirmed” by the church leadership and congregation regarding their sexual orientation? Or else is there pressure from them to stay within cis-heteronormative constructs, like marriage and family with children. Is there an overt attitude of acceptance but a more or less covert expectation for the LGBT+ person to stuff their sexuality in a box somewhere out of sight and be the straight-passing person the church demands they be?
What about for mixed-orientation marriages, where one spouse comes out as LGBT+? Are they made to feel guilty, even ‘unintentionally’, for wanting anything else outside of their marriage as part of the equation? Is the LGBT+ person made to feel indebted, like they owe their spouse for sticking with them all the years they were together? Is there criticism about ungratefulness, self-centeredness, the LGBT+ spouse putting their own happiness before the spouse’s and their family’s? Then, maybe the ‘affirmation’ only goes so far. What about the spouse being ‘left behind’ in a way by their LGBT+ spouse? What about their children? Where is the faith community that is open and affirming of their situation, a safe haven, a place of refuge and encouragement and guidance?
I think the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus preached, would welcome both the LGBT+ spouse and the cis-hetero spouse, as well as their children. It would take serious grappling with difficult and thorny questions, but the only other place I see this happening currently is with the psychotherapist community. And they are paid for their work! It is an weighty indictment of contemporary Christianity that mixed-orientation marriages have no community in which to receive the love and guidance they need to navigate those rough seas except that for which they can afford to pay for in secular psychotherapy. This is one reason I no longer count myself a ‘Christian’. I have found more Christ-like people among secular therapists than among any Christian congregation I have belonged to. This makes me incredibly sad and angry. It is a betrayal of what Jesus taught and stood for.
Let’s talk about self-harm. I was taught to do myself physical harm as a way of creating an aversion to same-sex attraction. That is, I was instructed by a so-called “Christian Counselor” to inflict my body with real pain to the point of shedding blood (Heb 12:4) to resist the sin of desiring men romantically and sexually. And isn’t that the example of Jesus? He subjected himself to death on the cross for us. Aren’t we supposed to become like Christ, sharing in his sufferings? Isn’t it the heart of Christ: self-denial, self-sacrifice? So, I learned to harm myself as worship to God. I learned to dissociate from my sinful body and its base desires. I learned to want nothing at all, save to give myself wholly to the work of God’s Kingdom as dictated to me by the church/cult. Can you see how outrageous it feels to want something more than what I promised my wife in our wedding vows? Can you imagine how illegitimate it feels when my therapists say time and again that my marriage was arranged by the church and that I was forced into it, even if for my wife there wasn’t the same level of coercion? What that Christian counselor and conversion therapist believed was Biblical self-denial, a sacrifice of this present earthly life for the promise of reward in the life to come, was extended and enlarged to include my whole life by the cult, both in the area of sexuality and every other conceivable area of existence. This is why it took so long to recognize the abuse as such: I already equated pain and suffering with worshiping God. I already saw obedience through my own bloodshed as fitting and right. Any thought of self-preservation was obliterated.
After half a lifetime lived in service of God, I want there to be some Ultimate Reality, some Truth that has to do with Perfect Love. I just don’t know though. I’ve had too many ecstatic experiences that I just can’t simply ignore. Nevertheless, I am shedding as much as I can – slowly but surely – all of the Evangelical theology that I used to believe because it is toxic and was leading me to death quite literally.
At the very least, going through the multiple traumas I have survived has split my soul. All of the complex trauma I have experienced was survived by Dissociative Identity Disorder, what used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder. So, my or our experience of daily life is quite literally ‘multiple’ or ‘plural’. That is, there are many of us sharing one body. I have only had this diagnosis about two years, but as a model it is the best fit yet for how I live.
For the 39 years I was in Evangelicalism, the only explanation for what was wrong with me was a “spiritual issue” or just “sin”. As a child I believed I was tormented by demons. The church I joined as an adult told me I had to “put off my old, worldly identity” and “put on my new identity in Christ” by faith. Try as I did, I could never shake the desperation of knowing something was fundamentally baffling and broken in me. This was met by crushing guilt over my lack of faith in the perfect work of Christ to redeem me as well as public shaming by the pastors for being so long in the faith yet still needing the elementary things again when I should be mature and able to serve others. I once even dared to confess to my pastors – with great fear and trembling – my sense that I was two people living in one body, to ask for their help and Spiritual direction. Instead they severely corrected me and shamed me for even entertaining such a faithless, unbiblical notion. I felt like a lost cause, a waste of church resources, a gangrenous member of the Body that it would be better simply to cut off and let die rather than cripple the Body any further.
What is so damaging is that the Evangelical worldview only allows for the one explanation: it’s a sin issue. If I were truly following Christ – never mind how much I was killing myself to do everything I was asked and more – then I would have peace, healing, joy in the Holy Spirit. Since I didn’t, I manifestly still had secret sin, or I wasn’t appropriating Christ’s new life with sufficient faith. I was told everything from “ask God for another measure of faith” to “you’re just not ‘crying out’ with enough humility and dependence.” It was all my fault.
Growing up in authoritarian, fundamentalist, Evangelical, culty churches, I had no other vocabulary to understand the terror, the voices and visions I would feel, hear and see – sometimes inside my head, sometimes outside myself – except demons, spiritual warfare, God’s judgement. Then as an adult, I went to a more contemporary, sophisticated Evangelical cult-like church where after 20 years of service I finally allowed myself to ask how much longer, how much more self-sacrifice, self-denial, would I have to suffer before Jesus would heal me?
As my faith started breaking down, I became suicidal yet again. My wife begged me to seek secular psychological help. When I finally did begin therapy secretly (my pastors and the group did not know I was doing so) at last I started learning other words/models for how to think about and understand my life. I could recognize myself differently, without (or with less) judgement. I could stop hiding.
Not until I sought secular psychotherapy did the diagnostic framework start helping me make sense of myself. First burnout from an abusive hierarchical professional relationship. Then major depression and anxiety not explained by the conflict with my former boss. Then PTSD related to my traumatic brain injury back in 2003 from a serious car accident. And finally, the complex trauma and Religious Trauma Syndrome from the spiritual abuse sustained in the “church” I belonged to for 20 years as well as the horrendous Evangelical upbringing I was subjected to previously.
That therapist helped me a lot. His experience was mainly with former prisoners of war and asylum seekers, etc. Pretty heavy trauma. I was seeing him ostensibly for burnout at work and depression/anxiety. It took me six months to finally open up about church. But when I finally did, he said we had at last come to the root issue. It took another six months before I finally accepted that my church was a cult and had enough courage to leave. The therapist said my trauma was like any of the most severe cases he had ever worked, among torture victims and people held prisoner and raped and beaten for being from the wrong ‘tribe’. It wasn’t until we started talking about the church and it’s hold on me that he understood where all the trauma was coming from.
After I left the church, I decided my therapist wasn’t “fitting” well anymore. I had hit a wall with him. I needed something else to continue my healing journey. After some struggle, I told him and he validated my choice. I “shopped” around – probably 10 different therapists before I found the clinical psychologist and expert in trauma and dissociation that I still see now. I knew in my gut that she was the one to help me on the next portion of my path. She has been amazing and I am so glad I gave myself permission to find her. Within a few sessions of working with her, she was convinced of the DID diagnosis. At 41 years old now, I finally have a way to understand myself that isn’t demon possession, insanity/psychosis, or fundamental insufficiency. At last there is a path forward and I am so grateful.
